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Sunday, August 28, 2016

Flying Last Class -- My Immediate and Unceremonious Deportation from Nigeria, the Joys of Moroccan Airport Transit Area Imprisonment, and the Hassles of Doing Business in Africa

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(No technical material in this post -- this one is pure "travel nightmare non-fiction", with some related general political commentary at the end....)

I recall Warren Buffett stating at some point. that, while
he ate the same hamburgers and used the same laptops as people with more
ordinary net worths, he did not travel the same way.He traveled by private plane, which he
considered qualitatively different from traveling via commercial jets and public
airports.At the time he made the
comment he was peddling time-share jets, arrangements in which a person can buy
the right to use a private jet drawn from a particular fleet, say, 10 times per
year.This is cheaper than owning one's
own jet, so it opens up private jet travel to a certain class of people who are
only extremely rich rather than keeping it restricted solely to the insanely
rich.

The frustrating, time-wasting aspect of the routine of being
a commercial passenger was parodied beautifully by South Park in their "It
Machine" episode, in which an entrepreneur created an alternative to air
travel that looked like a human-sized, fast-spinning hamster ball.The new device had the downside that, in
order to operate it, you had to get reamed up the butt by an onboard
dildo.But the punchline was,
"Still, it's better than dealing with the airlines."In any case, the airlines sent thugs to shut
down the operation manufacturing and distributing the new device, as it
threatened their market hegemony.(It
turned out that the dildo was an unnecessary feature inserted by the machine's
inventor due to his own perversions.But
that's another story.....)

I haven't yet traveled by private jet (at time of writing,
mid 2016 ... in the future who knows ... I do have a couple friend with private
jets but they haven't yet invited me to fly with them -- hint hint -- ), but
I've experienced the scope of commercial travel options, from first class -- where you're treated like a prince -- to
"last class," where due to paperwork irregularities you're
effectively jailed in a remote corner of an unclean airport terminal and
deprived of most rights for an arbitrary period of time.

My most extreme first class experience was when I got flown
to Kazakhstan, to meet with the Prime Minister to discuss AGI and
longevity.Not having a private jet, I
still had to change planes 3 times en route from Hong Kong to Astana.And one of the changes was in Urumqi, which
-- as I've observed since then through repeated trials -- nearly always seems
to involve missing a connection.(Flights into Urumqi are nearly always very late -- I'm not sure why,
but I have a hypothesis.Urumqi is the
capital of Xingiang, China's major Muslim province, and it seems the central
government's air traffic control algorithm does not prioritize getting flights
out to Urumqi on time.The good news
is, spending a night in Urumqi is usually reasonably pleasant -- the people are
extremely nice and the Xingiang food is delicious.)Still, except the missed connection in
Urumqi on the way there, every connection was extremely smooth, due to never
having to wait in any line -- there were VIP lines (with no waits) for first
class passengers at every step of the way.Asian airports are pretty rigorous about giving first class passengers
special treatment.The seats were
invariably super-comfortable, so I could sleep as much as I wanted on the
flights, without being woken by an aching neck or a stiff leg.The food on the flights was good, and the
food in some of the VIP lounges at the airports where I changed planes, was
really quite delectable.The VIP lounge
in the Bangkok airport was especially memorable.It's easy to see how one would become a fat
capitalist pig, traveling from one VIP lounge to another and feasting on the
"free" ritzy hors d'ouvres.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of traveling first class I've
found -- especially in Asia -- is the bizarre degree of deference shown by the
flight attendants.They seem so
tentative and apologetic when asking me to put on my seatbelt. They are
constantly monitoring in case it seems like you might need a little food or
water, or help operating the machinery of the seat.The vibe is very much that they are your
temporary servants, the idea being that many of the folks in first class are
quite accustomed to having servants.Of
course, a good percentage of them are just ordinary folks who have used
frequent flyer miles to upgrade their seats to first class, or people like me
traveling on business with their seats paid by some organization.But the vibe is still one of masters and
servants -- quite unlike in economy class, where the flight attendants are
often overworked and expressly irritated to have to deal with so many people
and their demands ... and where getting a simple request fulfilled (like, say,
a cup of water) can require repeated reminders, or polling various staff until
one finds one who will help.

Traveling in first class, things seem easy and leisurely,
and one begins to view the hordes of economy class passengers buzzing around
crowdedly in the back part of the plane as an entirely different species --
maybe some sort of bug-people.

Nevertheless, I have never chosen to spend my own money on
first class tickets.I'd much rather
save the exorbitant fees and be one of the bug-people, unless some company or
conference is paying the bill....

And of course, from the perspective of the Warren Buffetts
of the world, who fly only in their private jets, the self-important slightly
rich or upgraded people riding in first class are not too far off from the even
more peonic peons huddled back in economy class.A king from one perspective is a bug from
another; so it goes....

On the other hand, I experienced the opposite of any sort of
luxurious, top-class treatment on a trip to Nigeria -- which ended up involving
only a very brief stay in Nigeria itself.I was supposed to go there to deliver a speech to a conference called
"Disruptive Africa", dealing with radical tech innovation in Africa.The
folks organizing the conference seemed great -- ambitious people thoroughly
devoted to bringing advanced tech to Nigeria and West Africa.The title of the conference felt a bit ironic
to me, as isn't Africa disrupted enough already?But I had spoken at one of their previous
conferences via Skype, and been reasonably impressed by the questions after my
talk, so I was interested to go meet the people face to face.

The organizers warned me to apply for my Nigerian visa long
in advance, but I was busy so I started the process only 3 weeks before my
travel there.This was the root of my
problems.As an American I'm not used to
elaborate visa application processes -- generally for Americans, travel to
foreign countries is either visa-free, or involves a rubber-stamp
visa-on-arrival, or an eVisa application done online in advance and resulting
in a visa a couple days afterwards.China still requires Americans to apply for a visa via one of their
embassies, but there are agencies that will get this done for you with a day or
two notice if you are willing to pay a couple hundred dollars fee.

Other African countries I've traveled to, give Americans a
visa on arrival without much rigmarole.The only subtlety is that you sometimes need a "yellow card" signed
by a doctor proving that you've had a yellow fever vaccine.Nigeria is different though.From what I could understand, the process of
getting a tourist or business visa to Nigeria involves (in 2016) the
embassyholding your passport for at
least 2 weeks, sometimes more.At the
time I was preparing to speak at this conference in Lagos, I was not able to
give my passport to the Nigerian embassy for 2 to 3 weeks, because I was
visiting the US and had a couple one-day trips to Canada scheduled in the
interim, which required me to have my passport with me.So I emailed the organizers of Disruptive
Africa and told them I couldn't make it this year.

I thought that was that -- but a few days later the
organizers responded, and told me there was something called a Business Visa on
Arrival.I was surprised, because I'd
called a couple US visa agents dealing specifically with Nigerian visas and
none of them had mentioned it to me.(I
would soon find out why....).But
indeed, as they pointed out, there was a website where one could apply for this
sort of visa.Feeling guilty about
cancelling my talk, and eager to experience the rising Nigerian tech community,
I decided to take that option.

Filling out the online form for the visa was easy
enough.Paying the required $180 for the
visa was less easy, because none of my credit or debit cards would work on the
website.Rather, each time I tried to
use one of my cards on the site, the result was that no payment went through
and instead that card was disabled by my bank's automated anti-fraud
system.I called the bank and asked
them specifically to add that website to the list of transaction partners I was
allowed to use without being shut down by the anti-fraud software.They said they would do that. But it still didn't work.I ended up needing to obtain a postal money
order and mail it to the company that did the business visa on arrival
processing for the Nigerian embassy (which has an exclusive contract with the
Nigerian embassy, but is not the same as the Nigerian embassy -- a fact that
would be hammered home to me a little later).It was a minor pain in the ass dealing with the postal money order,
since the need to send the money order popped up for me in the midst of a
hectic business trip around Silicon Valley, but it wasn't really a big
deal.It turns out there's a good old
fashioned US post office selling money orders in Palo Alto, just a couple
blocks from University Avenue where rich geeks and Stanford students sit in
quaint cafes discussing advanced electronic payment systems, and AI and
nanotech and web n.0 business deals.

Once the visa process seemed to be underway, i bought a
ticket to Lagos -- I was on the US West Coast at the time, so it was a flight
to Lagos from San Francisco by way of New York and Casablanca.From Lagos I would then go on to Addis Ababa
for a quick visit to my AI software office there, iCog Labs, and then finally
back to Hong Kong -- the last leg of a marathon 6 week journey, mostly within
the US.

A couple days before the flight, I was still a bit confused
by the visa process, so I called the company ("Innovate1" or some
such) that handled the visas for the embassy, and they assured me that if I
downloaded the application form and the payment receipt, and brought printed
versions with me, everything would be all right.I tried to call the Nigerian embassy in New
York to double-confirm, but they never answered their phone; I just got put
through to a voicemail that was never answered.(This sort of thing is fairly common for African embassies, it
seems.My daughter tried to find the
Ethiopian embassy in Hong Kong at its listed address, and never found it.Someone else told us that the HK Ethiopian
embassy is actually a jewelry store that specializes in selling pirated ivory
and so forth.She also found that the
Ethiopian embassy in DC never answers their English-language phone line, but
does answer their Amharic-language phone line -- and that the people who answer
the Amharic-language phone line actually speak English.)

I wasn't too worried, because I figured once I actually got
to Lagos, if there were any problems, the immigration staff could call the
conference organizers and they could come to the airport and explain.This is how things worked in other countries
I was familiar with.In the US, if
there's an issue with your immigration, you can get held up a little while,
while they get more information.For
instance, my son Zebulon got held up coming into the US recently even though
he's a US citizen, because he's Muslim and was flying in from the Arab
world.And when I flew into Ethiopia
for the first time, Getnet (my Ethiopian business partner) came into the airport,
using his military ID to get into the restricted customs area, to help smooth
things over.So I figured once I
actually got to Nigeria, things would be all right one way or another.

Before leaving, at some point I also looked up online to double-check
if I needed a yellow fever vaccination certificate -- I had one, but had left
it at home in Hong Kong -- but the Nigerian embassy website stated that it was
necessary only if traveling to Nigeria from a yellow fever zone.The US was not listed as a yellow fever
zone, so I figured that was OK.This
agreed with what the Innovate1 people had said on the topic, also.

After an 8.5 hour flight to Casablanca, a 5 hour layover
(where I enjoyed some decent Moroccan fast food, and admired the
elegant-looking Moroccan staff in the airport), and a 3.5 hour flight to Lagos
-- there I was in Nigeria, finally.

The first thing I encountered was a woman telling me that I
did indeed need a yellow fever card, or else I'd be immediately deported.Being immediately deported sounded bad.I told her what the "Innovate1"
people had told me on the phone, and what the website had said; and she said I
should have contacted the embassy directly.I pointed out that the embassy never answered their phone.She asked if I could give her a little
help.I also pointed out that I had in
fact been vaccinated for yellow fever, though I'd left my card at home in Hong
Kong.I also offered to get vaccinated
again at the airport if needed.She
repeated that she needed some help.I
offered her $20, but she didn't consider that helpful enough.Unfortunately I didn't have any other US
money in my wallet but $100 bills, so I had to offer her $100.OK, that hurdle was passed.

Next step was to pass immigration.The immigration officers at the regular
booths were baffled by the "visa on arrival" concept, but after a
while they dug up an official who knew about them, and he looked at my papers
and rushed me across the airport to a small "visa on arrival"
office.The officials there did not
speak to me at all -- I talked only to the junior immigration guy who dragged
me to the visa on arrival office in the first place.My attempts to speak to them were met with
blunt rebuffals.They looked at my
papers and noted that I was missing a piece of paper stating the visa application
was approved.I said that, based on my
phone call with the Innovate1 people, I thought all I needed to bring was a
print-out of the application and the receipt for payment.I suggest that perhaps he could wait until
the immigration office opened in Lagos (it was 5:45AM or so), and call them and
then they could confirm that in fact the visa had been approved even though the
Innovate1 website had not correctly produced the piece of paper he was after.

He asked who had invited me there, and I produced the
invitation letter from the local organizer of the conference.He tried to call the organizer, but didn't
get an answer.I pointed out that it was
6AM and perhaps we should wait a little while, and then we'd reach him on the
phone and tell him to come to the airport and explain.I also explained that there would be a crowd
of people at the Sheraton there in Lagos waiting for me to speak later that
afternoon, so it really would not be a good idea to kick me out or hold me
there too long.

However, this officer appeared not to hear anything I said
(I'm not sure how good his English comprehension was), and he appeared to draw
the conclusion that, because the conference organizer had not answered his
phone at 6AM, the invitation letter I had produced was some sort of fraud.He said something in a non-English language
to the junior officer who had brought me to his office, and then I was rushed
off somewhere else.I didn't like the
looks of this, but followed along tentatively.

When it became apparent that I was being dragged to the
"Departures" part of the airport, I stopped walking and said I didn't
want to go to Departures.I said we
should wait until we contacted the conference organizer on the phone, and then
he could come and help clarify things, since I didn't understand the situation
but he would, being a local.Since I
wouldn't walk, the junior officer finally agreed to call the conference
organizer (I couldn't call myself, lacking a local sim card or a Net
connection).We got through now, at
6:20AM.A brief call ensued, but it
didn't seem to affect anything.I kept
complaining that the whole process made no sense.But the junior officer just kept saying
"He didn't answer the phone."I pointed out that one wouldn't necessarily expect someone to answer
their phone at 6AM, it was kind of early.He just said "6AM is not early for an important business
call."

Finally, he said he would have me arrested and put in jail
if I wouldn't walk.I just stood there
arguing more, starting to become angry a bit -- and he grabbed my arm to pull
me.It wasn't really a violent scuffle
yet, but I could see that potential and I figured I was very likely to be
outmuscled by the Nigerian immigration police force, so I bit back my fiery
temper and just went along with the guy, arguing all the way.

I was rushed out through a service door onto the runway, bypassing
the normal gates and walkways and so forth, and was dragged-while-walking-very-fast
across the runway, past the luggage trucks and so forth, to an airplane that
was boarding.

Being a stubborn fuck, again I stopped moving, and told the
junior officer this made no sense.I
asked him to please bring me back to the visa on arrival office, so that the
senior immigration officer could talk to the conference organizer
directly.He just said, "He didn't
answer the phone at first; now it's too late."

I said "Look, there must be a way" -- figuring
this was the time he would ask for a bribe.I started to realize there must have been some bribery opportunity
earlier, that I had missed, in my naivete' and unfamiliarity with the Nigerian
"system."

"There's no way now,"
he said."If I bring you back
there, it won't be good for you."

"What do you mean?!" I protested."Look, there will be a room full of
people at the Sheraton waiting to hear me speak about the future of
technology.All around your airport
there are signs about how great Nigeria is for international business!If you want your country to be good for
international business, maybe you shouldn't kick out people who have flown here
at their own expense to speak at business conferences and start business collaborations
with your people!!"

"You came without the right
visa paperwork."

"I came with what I was
told to bring."

Meanwhile he was trying to physically yank me toward the
plane, and I was standing there stubbornly.

"You were told that by a private company," he
repeated."You should have called
the embassy."

"The embassy doesn't answer
their phone," I pointed out again..

"Look, it's hopeless now," he said."If I bring you back there now, you will
be put in jail, or you will have to pay a lump sum."

Aha, I thought.Here
we are getting to the meat of it."How big of a lump sum?"I asked."What's the price
to let me stay in the airport long enough for the conference organizer to come
here and help?"

Obviously this wasn't quite the right approach.I started to think perhaps the culturally
appropriate move would have been to offer money to the senior immigration
officer when I'd been in his office.But
he hadn't really spoken to me directly, nor been willing to listen to anything
I said.Maybe he would have listened to
the appearance of green-colored money emerging from my wallet, though.

"You have to come back with the right paperwork,"
he said."You can fly away now and
come back tonight with the right paperwork."

"That's a huge waste of time and money," I
argued."Plus I'm supposed to give
a talk THIS AFTERNOON at the Sheraton.How much of a lump sum do you guys need?"

Another immigration officer came up and grabbed my bags and
began carrying them to the plane.I gave
up and followed along.And before I knew
it, there I was on a 6:30AMplane back
to Casablanca, having been in Nigeria about one hour.

My plan had been to proceed from Lagos to Addis Ababa, after
the conference, and then from Addis back to my home in Hong Kong.Having been booted from Nigeria, my new plan
was to hang out in Morocco for a couple days, then fly from there to
Addis.Or else, if somehow the
immigration mess got solved by the conference organizer while I was on the
plane, maybe I really would fly back to Lagos that night.

When I got to Casablanca airport, however, I realized things
were going to be much more annoying than that.Although Americans don't need a visa to enter Morocco, nevertheless they
refused to release me into Morocco.The
airline officials put my passport in a locked safe in the airport transit
office, and said they were bound by international law to return me to my
country of origin.I pointed out that I
lived in Hong Kong and had a ticket back to Hong Kong from Addis Ababa -- I did
not have a ticket back to the US and did not live there, even though I was
traveling on a US passport.But they
said that they were required to send me, as a deportee, back to my country of
citizenship.

Over the next 16 hours, while I was stuck (actually,
"imprisoned" would be perfectly accurate) in the transit area of the
Casablanca airport, I attempted to argue that I should be allowed to fly to
Addis or Hong Kong rather than back to the US.I offered to buy my own ticket to Addis or HK, if they'd give me my
passport and let me on the plane.The
staff in the transit office at the airport seemed to rotate every 2 or 3 hours,
so I kept making the argument over and over again to each new batch of staff.They kept telling me that they had to send me
back to the US; but they weren't telling me when their plan of shipping me back
to the US would be effectuated.

The Internet connectivity in the transit area was spotty and
restricted -- each device could only get 2-3 hours of Internet and then it would
be cut off.And out of that 2-3 hours,
most was lost due to bad connectivity.I
was glad I had a phone and two laptops with me.But I used up some my precious connectivity
time, via letting other people also imprisoned there use my devices to communicate
and look up information regarding their own plans.My power adapter, with its two extra USB
ports, was also a valuable commodity there -- most of the people stranded there
had no way to charge their phones, which was a major problem.So during my tenure in the Casablanca transit
prison, my laptop and power adapter were continually occupied charging other
peoples' phones.

At first I thought there was no food and water in the
transit area, but then at some point someone came by and gave me a chicken nugget
sandwich and a bottle of Sprite.I abhor
soda but I couldn't be fussy -- it seemed better than the Moroccan sink or
toilet water.The chicken nuggets were
actually real chicken, not texturized soy protein -- better than McDonald's at
any rate.

(When I started
writing this essay, I had some second thoughts about calling the transit area
of the Casablanca airport a "jail" in which I was temporarily
"imprisoned" -- I mean, I'm sure actual Moroccan prisons are
massively less desirable places.On the other
hand, the essential principle of a jail is that you are physically confined and
are at the mercy of your jailers.This
principle was fulfilled.And if you
compare to, say, a Norwegian rather than a Moroccan prison, then things look a
bit different -- in Norwegian prison you get better food, water undiluted with
sugar and toxins, a bed to sleep in instead of a ratty floor, and more and
better Internet access.You even get
private conjugal visits.But the
Norwegian prison is still a jail, because you're forced to stay there.All in all I think the use of the term is
fair. The current system incarcerates people in airport transit areas, often
quite unsanitary and disgusting by developed-world standards, often for days at
a time, in response to minor paperwork errors, or failures in bribery
etiquette.)

After about 10 hours of imprisonment there, things seemed to
start going better -- the transit-staff-of-the-hour agreed that I could fly to
Addis if I bought my own ticket online.I pointed out there were no direct flights, but he said it was OK if
there was a flight change.With great
effort, due to the spotty Net connection, I used about 40 minutes of my
precious online time buying a ticket to Addis.But by the time this was done, that staff member had rotated off.He had promised me he would tell his
replacement about the plan we'd agreed on; but nevertheless, the new staff
member would hear nothing of it.It was
back to "No, you have to fly back to the US, because that's the country on
your passport."

I argued and wheedled and begged.I considered attempting bribery, but there
were lots of other staff around and I realized it wasn't Nigeria -- I wasn't
quite sure what was the risk of being arrested for attempted bribery in
Morocco.Avoiding jail seemed more
valuable than avoiding being flown back to the US.Finally I realized it was hopeless, and I went
online to cancel the ticket -- but due to the bad Internet connection I
couldn't carry out the operation.And
the flight was leaving quite shortly -- it seemed I was about to lose the $500
I'd spent on that ticket to Addis.In
desperation I emailed a few family members telling them, if they were online,
to help out poor imprisoned Ben and cancel the plane ticket for him.
Fortunately my daughter was paying attention to her phone and got my message
and called the online travel agency to cancel the ticket, which was done
without penalty!Three cheers for the
always-online, unimprisoned younger generation!

I was far from the only person in a confusing, indeterminate
quasi-imprisoned state in the Casablanca airport.Although, I was the only white-skinned
person among the set of individuals thus afflicted, during the time I was
there.

There was one Canadian girl, apparently of African descent,
who had been rejected admission from the Congo due to some visa
irregularity.She assured me this kind
of thing happened constantly in Africa, and you just had to grin and bear it.It always ended after a few days.She was going to get flown back to Canada,
giving up on getting into the Congo for now.When she heard I was flying to Addis, she asked me to buy her a ticket
too -- she said we could be traveling companions.It seemed fairly clear in context that what
was intended was a "traveling companion with benefits".She was nice-looking and energetic, but that
wasn't what I was looking for ... and in the end I wasn't allowed to fly to
Addis anyway....

Another Canadian woman of African descent had been on the
same plane as me to and from Lagos -- and had been rejected for the same exact
reason as me.She also hadn't
understood how or if or when to make a bribe in that context.The fact that she had been through basically
the same process as me -- except that she had argued and struggled less -- was
an indicator to me that I had not been rejected because I looked like a bit of
a hippie freak.This woman looked
perfectly normal; she was a well-dressed, well-spoken young black woman,
international-looking and -acting so that one couldn't tell by interacting with
her if she was a middle-class American or a middle-class African.Like me, she was just baffled by the Nigerian
way of doing things, and had come with what she had rationally believed -- based
on the information she'd been given -- to be an adequate set of documents to
get a business visa on arrival.

Most of the people detained in that transit area with me
were Africans from various nations -- a few were refugees, but most were just
ordinary citizens who had fallen afoul of some country's bureaucratic
immigration peculiarities.They all
seemed to take their predicament with much less annoyance than yours
truly.To them, this was just part of
the process of traveling -- something that could be expected to occur from time
to time.At 1AM and 2AM, a number of
them were singing and dancing together in the transit area, to a loud MP3
player with speakers that one of them had brought.As they jumped around going "Waka Waka
Waka" and so forth, shaking their booties and genuinely making the best of
the situation, I did reflect on the benefits of their easygoing attitude -- but
nevertheless, being an impatient American, I still wanted pretty badly to get
the fuck out of there as quickly as I could.

Anyway, after 15 hours in the Casablanca transit area, I was
put on a plane back to New York, my homeland....From which I immediately booked a flight
back to Addis, but at a higher cost than if I'd been able to fly there directly
from Casablanca.By the time I got back
to New York my ass was seriously sore from sitting on airplane seats and
transit lounge seats for so many hours.

On the other hand, at least I had had my trusty little
Macbook Air with me through it all; and there had been reliable electrical
power even if not much Internet.During
all that hassle, I had made huge progress on editing a novel-in-progress that
had been sitting on my laptop ("A Secret Love of Chaos"), and I'd
finished a long-delayed research proposal.

A nice capstone to the ordeal was that, when I arrived back
in New York, it turned out that my suitcase had gotten sent from Casablanca to
Lagos, rather than to New York.Furthermore, the airline had not put the proper tags on it -- so after I
waited in line an hour to file a complaint about the missing bag with Royal Air
Maroc at JFK airport in New York, they told me the bag did not exist and there
would be no way to get it back.

BUT -- while I was getting this bad news from the airline
officer in New York, I got a phone call from someone in Lagos -- an individual named
Jacob Ogbonna who worked at the airport there.He had noticed my suitcase randomly astray there, and had noticed that,
while it lacked a proper airline tag, it did have a tag withmy name, phone number and email address on
it.So he called my phone number and he
emailed me some pictures of my bag, snapped with his smartphone.After some back and forth, he arranged for
Ethiopian Airlines to send my bag back to Hong Kong for me.This was a big relief to me, as the bag
contained some obscure music equipment and poetry books I had bought in the US
-- stuff that was valuable to me because it was not findable in Hong Kong, even
though its economic value was not extremely high.

Jacob Ogbonna did not need to help me, he just chose to,
because -- apparently -- he is a good human being.If the immigration officers had been as
good-hearted and helpful as Jacob Ogbonna, I would have saved a lot of money
and hassle and given my talk at the Disruptive Africa conference as planned.

Anyway, that's done for now -- but I will make it back to
Nigeria to give a talk and establish research and business contacts sometime --
maybe next year, we'll see.I'm not
easily defeated, and I realize that getting stuff done in Africa involves a lot
of unexpected complexities and requires a lot of persistence.Next time I will definitely not do the
"visa on arrival" for Nigeria though...

Beyond my own personal hassles, I think this little tale of
inconvenience and wasted money and opportunity is reasonably indicative of the
kind of thing that makes it harder than it should be for Africa to rise in
business, science and technology.Of course, global wealth inequality and
various forms of imperialism are major factors stifling Africa's rise.But internal organizational factors also
appear to play a substantial role.

There are so many smart, hard-working and good-hearted
people throughout every African country -- but the practical institutional
systems there very often act against the goals of the people.Denying the keynote speaker of a
tech-business conference entry the country because of a minor paperwork
irregularity (caused by bad advice from a contractor of the Nigerian
government, and the inability of the Nigerian embassy to answer their phone),
while posting signs all around the airport about the international business
friendly environment -- this is utterly symbolic of the current situation.

I thought a bit, while stewing in the Casablanca transit
area, about how truly rich or famous visitors to Nigeria would avoid the kind
of hassle I'd experienced.My conclusion
was that they would simply contract with some local Nigerian agency to make all
their arrangement for them -- and this local agency would make whatever
arrangements were necessary with the immigration authorities (possibly -- no,
probably -- no, well, almost surely! -- including payment of appropriate bribes
to appropriate people).The business
environment is perfectly friendly for big companies that can afford to
appropriately compensate the appropriate array of government officials, and
that can hire people who understand the system fully.But it's not at all friendly to small-time
foreign entrepreneurs.

I have seen similar, though not identical, phenomena in
Ethiopia.Getting into Ethiopia is easy
enough ... they offer a "visa on arrival" that is basically
automatically granted to everyone from a developed country.But shipping goods into Ethiopia involves
incredible paperwork complexity, and requires more funds than one would think
(i.e. much more than the cost of the goods being bought, to deal with various
banking requirements).For a big
company with large cash reserves and lots of lawyers and bureaucrats on staff,
such things are all easily handle-able.But for small-time entrepreneurs, the process is extremely arduous and
off-putting -- as we discovered while trying to import the materials for our
iCog Makers soccer-playing robots into Ethiopia from China.

We got the robots imported into Ethiopia finally... and I'll
go back to Nigeria and give a talk eventually.But I'm pigheadedly persistent, as are my Ethiopian colleagues at
iCog.It's easy to see why a lot of
entrepreneurs from the developed world would decide the hassles of doing
business with African countries are just too much to deal with, especially
given the relative difficulty making profit there compared to other wealthier
regions.If African governments want to
help their countries transition into advanced technological economies, they
should stop holding things back with byzantine and punitive regulations that
make entrepreneurial activity more difficult than in the rest of the world.

Bear in mind I am not an advocate of unfettered capitalism
-- I'm a technoprogressive who advocates a fairly strong role for governments
in driving innovation, such as we've seen in South Korea and Singapore.But it's obvious that at the current stage
in human development, entrepreneurial small-business activity is one of the
biggest drivers of positive technological and social innovation ... and
governments need to foster this rather than place roadblocks in its way.

Spectacular story, funny and cruel.I hope good Jacob got a tip since you were ready to depart from some of your money in favour of less deserving people.I agree with your final political and economical views and disagree with the previous commentator since you are not talking of the same thing when mentioning Singapore and South Korea and Nigeria on the other hand. It is too simplistic to blame the government for cultural problems and put everything in the same bucket as techno-progressive/voluntarism aimed at betterment of society.Things do not become identical only because there is one agent called government in the picture. That is too silly.

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Ben, sorry for hearing of this troubles. Perhaps, you need to send this story to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as to the Min of education, if your contacts have government connections, they could send it as well. At least, the officials would get the feedback. Nigeria has been through many coups, which left it with fewer opportunities for proper administrative development. It is different from many less wealthy African countries in this respect. Plus, it is a huge country. In any case, officials in the central government need at least a chance to hear of the problems. Nigeria still has many many problem unresolved, but it will hopefully get through eventually.

Nearly all Nigerians are kind and intelligent people. However, there is probably some honor culture in some guys, which is often inappropriate in modern societies, like nobody would welcome cowboy-style behavior for real life these days. That's ok, it will be harmonized later on.

We had a lovely story of army fighting with police over us (sitting in taxi) in Lagos. We just need to be understanding and try to help. Actually, some automatization and digitalization of administrative processes might help to remove a lot of mess like this.